How does JConsole decide what order to use JMX keys to render a tree?

Question

When viewing JMX beans in JConsole it renders all the beans under a given domain part as a hierarchy. (JVisualVM has the same behaviour with the JConsole MBeans plugin.)

I realise that JMX object names are not hierarchical, but nevertheless JConsole is picking the keys in some order so that it can render them hierarchically.

Does anybody know what rules it uses to order the keys? It doesn't seem to be left-to-right or alphabetical.

Thanks.

Answer 1

It probably lays it out according the JMX ObjectName conventions from the JMX Best Practices Guide.